RE: Cron management...

We've been using EM for a long time for our jobs but similar to others this is only for our jobs. Why do we use it?

• I started using it over cron because it allowed me to centralize job management, along with automatically capturing job logs and execution status.
• As we (slowly) move away from direct access to the oracle installation account, new security rules don't allow for cron access except for certain exceptions.

I'm rather paranoid (DBAs are paid to be paranoid) so on each EM server I was able to obtain special permission to run cron jobs as the oracle installation user. These exceptions have the sole purpose of making sure nothing freakish has happened to various components of EM. This covers just a few different items with some being related to bugs we hit in previous releases that really hurt.

One thing about NFS with scripts, maybe our hardware vendor isn't managing NFS mounts correctly but periodically they go stale. When that happens, in our case the only way to fix the issue is to reboot the affected server. That's huge when it's a production server yet with the NFS being stale we lost access to all scripts PLUS a root-owned process (can't remember at the moment) starts spinning due to the situation. So yes, we're in the process of storing all scripts locally per server (400 to 500 servers). But with EM12c you can use provisioning functionality to copy code from one spot to another, which means you can use it to create a regular job to refresh all scripts from a central location on your EM to all other servers.

Dave Herring

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Chris Grabowy Sent: Sunday, April 12, 2015 1:47 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Cron management...

Howdy.

We currently have about 30 Redhat Linux servers running Oracle 11.2

Recently for a short time the crontab entry for a production backup was commented out.

Just last week one of the DBAs had "accidently" deleted all the backup scripts. The scripts directory is NFS mounted so it impacted every server.

The Netbackup folks like to do maintenance during the day. Any Oracle backups that may have been running abort. These days we get notice from the Netbackup folks but it's kinda tricky to check 30 servers and determine if anything is running. Or kick off 30+ archive log backup scripts across all the servers to clean up the archive log directories before the Netbackup maintenance.

Managing crontabs, jobs and scripts across 30 servers just doesn't seem to be working.

Our company uses a job scheduling app called Tidal. The manager of that app demo'd the product to me and it seems like it can address many of our headaches. In theory a single simple interface to manage all the jobs scheduled across all the database servers.

However one of the issues identified by the Linux admin is that the Tidal agent needs root access so he is reluctant to install the Tidal agent anywhere but a couple of designated Tidal servers.

I am wondering if other sites have stopped using crontab? If so then what did you replace it with?

Anyway, I am open to any thoughts, suggestions, etc.

Thanks,
Chris Grabowy

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